Richard Tillinghast
Richard Tillinghast (born 1940) is an American poet and prose author. Life Tillinghast is a native of Memphis, Tennessee. He earned a B.A. in 1962 from Sewanee University, and an M.A, in 1963 and Ph.D. in 1970 from Harvard University. At Harvard as a graduate student, he studied with poet Robert Lowell. He has taught at Harvard as a Briggs-Copeland lecturer, at the University of California, Berkeley, in the college program at San Quentin Prison, at Sewanee, and at the University of Michigan. Tillinghast has published 10 books of poetry as well as 3 non-fiction works: Damaged Grandeur, a critical memoir of Robert Lowell; Poetry and What Is Real (2004), a selection of his critical writings about poetry; and Finding Ireland: A poet's explorations of Irish literature and culture (2008), an introduction to the country through its literature, architecture, history, and art. His poetry collections include The New Life (2008) and Selected Poems (2009), Six Mile Mountain (2000) The Stonecutter's Hand (1995), and Today in the Cafe Trieste (1997), a new and selected poems issued by Salmon Publishing in Ireland.Meet Poets Julia Clare Tillinghast-Akalin and Richard Tillinghast to Discuss Their New Translation, Poets.org, Academy of American Poets. http://www.pw.org/content/richard_tillinghast_2 In 1997 Tillinghast edited A Visit to the Gallery, a collection of poems written in response to paintings at the Museum of Art at the University of Michigan. For 20 years he reviewed new poetry for the New York Times Book Review, and has also written frequently for The Irish Times. He has also reviewed and written literary essays for the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and New Criterion, as well as writing travel articles for the London Times. Tillinghast’s poems are informed by his travels, which have been supported by grants from the Creative Arts Institute, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Mary Roberts Rinehart Foundation, and the Michigan Council for the Arts, as well as fellowships from the American Research Institute in Turkey, the British Council, and the Irish Arts Council. He was a Woodrow Wilson Fellow at Harvard, and was also awarded a Sinclair-Kennedy Travel Grant as a graduate student. During 1964-1966 he was editor-in-chief of Let's Go: The student guide to Europe. His poems have appeared in magazines such as AGNI,http://www.cstone.net/~poems/agnitill.htm The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, The New Yorker, the Sewanee Review Ploughshares,http://www.pshares.org/read/author-detail.cfm?intAuthorID=1536 and Poetry, as well as online on Slate and Poetry Daily. In addition, his poems have been featured on Garrison Keillor's NPR show, The Writer's Almanac. In the early 1980s, he taught English at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee. While there he wrote a five-part poem about the history of the village and University entitled "Sewanee in Ruins." He has studied Turkish since the late 1980s and has been visiting Istanbul since 1964. Istanbul is the subject of some of his essays published in literary magazines such as Irish Pages, the Southern Review, Agni and Gettysburg Review. He and his daughter Julia Clare Tillinghast have collaborated on a book of translations from the poetry of Edip Cansever (1928-1986), Dirty August, published in 2009 by Talisman House. The father-daughter team was awarded a translation grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to assist with their work. Tillinghast retired in 2005 from the faculty of the Master of Fine Arts program at the University of Michigan, having been there since the program's inception in 1983. He has also been a Director of The Poets' House in Ireland, and founder of the Bear River Writer's Conference held annually near Petoskey, Michigan on Walloon Lake. Tillinghast has also done performance poetry: he released a poetry/music CD, My Only Friends Were the Wolves, with the Ann Arbor-based jazz fusion band Poignant Plecostomus in 1997. Tillinghast writes full-time. He recently moved back to the US after living for 5 years in co. Tipperary, Ireland He is a fly-fisherman, gardener, cook, and traveler. He also plays the guitar and sings. Writing Using formal constraint to shape and sharpen his examinations of historical and personal events, Tillinghast is often concerned with the elusive nature of home. Poet Floyd Skloot, reviewing The Stonecutter’s Hand (1995) for the Harvard Review, observed that in those poems, “the urgency — the impulse to go — rises from a need to strip the self down to its essence, to relocate intimacy and a sense of community by immersing himself in remoteness.” Louis Simpson wrote, "Tillinghast's poems range confidently among different cultures. He has a sense of history as a living force. The experiments in metre, rhyme and free verse in The Stonecutter's Hand are important. He is a wonderfully gifted poet, one of the few." And the late Anthony Hecht commented: "Of all the many complex, sometimes self-cancelling, tasks a poet must address, it may be that the most demanding and severe is getting things right. Richard Tillinghast performs that office with an honesty so strict that over and over his poems prove themselves faithful in ways that bring a quiet, undisputed delight." Recognition He has received the Amy Lowell Traveling Poetry Fellowship, the Ann Stanford Prize for Poetry, the Cleanth Brooks Award for creative non-fiction, and the James Dickey Poetry Prize. Tillinghast was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle’s Nona Balakian Award for Excellence in Book Reviewing. In 2010, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.http://www.gf.org/fellows/16875-richard-tillinghast He was awarded an honorary Doctor of Letters degree by the University of the South in 2008. Publications Poetry *''The Keeper''. Cambridge, MA: Pym-Randall, 1968. *''Sleep Watch: Poems''. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1969. ISBN 978-0-8195-2048-7 *''The Knife, and other poems''. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1980. ISBN 978-0-8195-1100-3 *''Sewanee in Ruins'' (illustrated by Edward Carlos). University of the South, 1981. *''Fossils, Metal, and the Blue Limit''. North Bennington, VT: White Creek Press, 1982. *''Easter Week: Vermont''. Winston-Salem, NC: Palaemon Press, 1982. *''Our Flag Was Still There: Poems'' (contains Sewanee in Ruins). Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1984. ISBN 978-0-8195-6099-5 *''A Quiet Pint in Kinvara''. Galway, Ireland: Salmon, 1991. *''The Stonecutter's Hand: poems''. Boston: Godine, 1995. *''Today in the Cafe Trieste''. Cliffs of Mohar, Co. Clare, Ireland: Salmon, 1997. ISBN 978-1-897648-84-1 *''Work Station''. New York: Foundation for Cultural Review, 1998. *''Six Mile Mountain''. Ashland, OR: Story Line Press, 2000. ISBN 978-1-885266-90-3 *''Greatest Hits, 1980-2001''. Johnstown, OH: Pudding House, 2002. ISBN 978-1-58998-020-4 *''The New Life: Poems''. Providence, RI: Copper Beech Press, 2008. ISBN 978-0-914278-83-2 *''Sewanee Poems'' (illustrated by Joseph Winkelman). Sewanee, TN: University of the South, Sewanee, 2009. *''Selected Poems''. Dublin: Dedalus Press, 2009. ISBN 978-1-906614-12-6 *''Wayfaring Stranger''. San Luis Obispo, CA: Word Palace Press, 2012. Non-fiction *''Robert Lowell's Life and Work: Damaged grandeur''. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1995. *''Poetry and What Is Real''. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2004. ISBN 978-0-472-09872-9 *''Finding Ireland: A poet's explorations of Irish literature and culture''. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008. ISBN 978-0-268-04232-5 *''An Armchair Traveller's History of Istanbul: City of remembering and forgetting''. London: Armchair Traveller, 2012. Edited *''A Visit to the Gallery: The University of Michigan Museum of Art''. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1997. Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy WorldCat.Search results = au:Richard Tillinghast, OCLC Online Computer Library Center Inc. Web, Mar. 25, 2015. See also *List of U.S. poets References Notes External links ;Poems *"Ars Poetica" *Richard Tillinghast b. 1940 at the Poetry Foundation *"Wake Me in South Galway" at How a Poem Happens ;Audio / video *Richard Tillinghast at YouTube ;Books *Richard Tillinghast at Amazon.com ;About *Richard Tillinghast at University of Michigan *Richard Tillinghast at Ploughshares *Richard Tillinghurst Official website Category:University of Michigan faculty Category:Writers from Michigan Category:1940 births Category:Living people Category:People from Memphis, Tennessee Category:American poets Category:Harvard University alumni Category:20th-century poets Category:English-language poets Category:Poets Category:American academics